Against the Day (85 page)

Appearing these
days
in the infant
science of counterterrorism as an allpurpose code name, the bloke you sent out
a discreet summons for to alert your own security staff to a crisis, the real
“Inspector Sands,” beleaguered, ever struggling to define and maintain a level
of professional behavior, unaware of his drift into legend, soon enough aged
beyond his years and sweated into a moodiness at home that could not but slop
over onto the wife and kids, would find by midcareer no time even to take off
his hat, hurrying as ever from one emergency to the next—“Ah, Sands,
there you are, and high time, too. We’ve a suspect individual—just down
there at the far wicket, can you see him?—no one can really place his
accent, some think Irish, others Italian, not to mention that queerlyshaped bag
he’s brought with him— we’re putting the ‘stall’ on him, of course, but
if there’s a
timed device
you
see, well that won’t do much good, will it?”

“In the shiny green suit, and sort of
gondolier’s hat, except for that. . . well it’s not a ribbon, is it—”

“More of a feather, almost a plume,
really—rather extreme wouldn’t you say?”

   
“
Could
be
Italian I suppose.”

“Some sort of wog, obviously. The
thing is, how shall one make out his shortterm intentions? Not likely in here
for a spot of Vic removal, is he?”

   
“The
bag might be only for carrying his lunch.”

“Typical of these people, who else
would think of eating an explosive substance?”

   
“What
I meant, actually, was
. . .
instead
of explosives?”

“Quite so, I knew that, but it could
be anything, then, couldn’t it? His laundry for instance.”

“Indeed. Though, what could you blow
up with a bag of laundry, I wonder.”

“
Oh,
bother, there now he’s pulling
something out of his pocket, I
knew it?
”
Uniformed guards at once began to converge on the
intruder, while outside

in the street the metropolitan police
were suddenly everywhere up and down St. Martin le Grand and over into Angel
Street, swarming in and out of the horsedrawn and motor traffic, dropping
suggestions into the ears of drivers best situated to create a general
vehicular paralysis, should one prove useful. The clerk at the wicket having
thrown himself sniveling beneath a nearby table, the subject quickly took up
his bag and fled out the front exit and across the street toward the G.P.O.
West, where all the telegraphic business was done. This was a vast and, to
many, an intimidating space, in the center of which, sunk below floor level,
four enormous steam engines labored to provide the pressures and vacuums that
propelled to and fro about the City and Strand thousands of pneumatic
dispatches per day, being tended by a sizable crew of stokers and monitored
round the clock for entropy fluctuations, vacuum failures and so forth by staff
engineers in gray drill suits and darkly gleaming dicers.

Cries of “There he goes!” and “Hold
up, you bloody anarchist!” were absorbed in the relentless polyrhythms of the
steammachinery. Against the greased writhing of these dark iron structures, a
brightwork of brass fittings and bindings, kept ashine through the nights by a
special corps of unseen chars, flashed like halos of industrious saints in
complex periodic motion everywhere. Hundreds of telegraphers, ranked about the great
floor attending each his set, scarcely looked up from their universe of clicks
and rests— uniformed messenger boys came and went among the varnished
hardwood labyrinth of desks and sortingbureaux, and customers leaned or paced
or puzzled over messages they had just received, or must send, as cheerless
London daylight descended through the windows and rising steam produced an
allbuttropical humidity in this Northern Temple of Connexion
. . . .

“ ’Ere then, Luigi, where’re we off
to in such a grea’ rush?” as a constable, popping up out of the marblework
unexpectedly, now attempted a sort of sliding football tackle upon the agile
Mediterranean, who slowed down long enough to snarl,

“For God’s sake, Bloggins, it’s me,
Gaspereaux, and if you’ll be kind enough to—”

   
“Oh.
Sorry, guv, didn’t—”

“No, no,
don’t touch your cap,
Bloggins
I’m in
disguise,
can’t you see, yes and what I actually need you to do,
now, quickly as ever we can, is to
pretend
to put me under
arrest—take me upstairs, without quite so much
friendly nudging
if
possible—”

“(Got you, guv.) All right then,
allegro vivatchy, my good man, we’ll justa puta thesea lovely bracelets on
shall we, as a formality only of course, oh this is my young Police Constable
colleague who’ll take charge of your interest

ing bag there as soon as he stops staring at it quite so
fixedly, won’t you Constable yes there’s a good chap
. . . .
” Escorting the prisoner, for whom handcuffs did not
noticeably interfere with his ethnic gesticulations, up a side staircase to a hallway
milling with uniformed guards, and beneath an imposing archway into the offices
of Internal Security.

“1 say it’s old Gaspereaux, what are
you doing with that cheap greasepaint all over your face? Not to mention that
beastly hat?”

“Only way I could find a moment to
chat with you, Sands, eyes and ears everywhere sort of thing—” Across the
room a cylinder of guttapercha carrying a pneumatic message now arrived in its
“D” box with a sort of jingling thud.

“Probably for me—” removing the
form and scanning it. “Right
. . . .
Damned
Suffragettes again I shouldn’t wonder. Oh sorry, Gasper, you were saying?”

“Sands, you know me. The meaning of
what I have seen, if I spoke of it, I would not understand, and if I understood
it, I could not—”

“Speak, yesyes well of course then if
you wouldn’t mind sharing a hack down to Holborn—”

   
“Not
at all, they’ll be wanting this costume back in Saffron Hill anyway.”

   
“Perhaps
we might even find time for a pint somewhere.”

   
“I
know just the place.”

Which turned out to be the Smoked
Haddock, one of Gaspereaux’s many locals, in each of which he would be known,
Sands expected, by a different identity.

   
“Evening,
Professor, all in order I trust?”

“Not if I can help it,” Gaspereaux
genially replied, in a tone higher, and with a coloring more suburban, than
Sands had yet heard from him.

“Now then what is all this, my son,
not a touch of the old occupational grandiosity I hope—”

   
“Sands,
I most desperately need—”

   
“No
prologues among us, Gasper,
tantum dic verbo
isn’t it.”

“Well then.” He recited as
dispassionately as he could what he had escaped, and what he feared had
befallen H.M.S.F.
Saksaul.
“It is the old Shambhala business again.
Someone, perhaps even one of ours, has found it at last.”

“How’s that?”

Gaspereaux repeated the fragments
he’d heard. “And the place is
. . .
intact.
Other subsurface ruins out there are filled with sand, of course, but in
Shambhala the sand is being
held away,
somehow, by some invisible sphere
of force like a gigantic air bubble—”

   
“So
anyone who knows where it is—”

“Can enter and occupy it, with no need for special
equipment.”

“Well this is splendid news, Gasper.”
But Gaspereaux was staring back with stricken eyes. “I meant, a—a shining
moment for England, I should have thought—”

“We are not the only ones there,
Sands. At this moment all the Powers present in the region are bringing in
their forces. Frigate actions like the
Saksaul
’s are
only the opening feints. Chances increase day by day for
some sort of sustained conflict over possession of the city, in regimental
strength if not larger.”

“But I’ve constant telephonic
connection with Whitehall—why hasn’t anyone ever mentioned this?”

“Oh because I’m mad, I suppose, and
it’s been all no more than a madman’s phantasy.”

“That’s just it, my boy, by now I know
that your most deranged utterances are only conventional history prematurely
blurted.” He produced a halfsovereign case in the shape of Mr.
CampbellBannerman’s head. “Need to find a telephone box, I suppose.
Oh
dearohdearohdear.” Off he went. The
dim blessed local, which when crossing the desert Gaspereaux had quite given up
on ever seeing again, slowly, sympathetically, drew him into its cherished
inability to imagine anything clearly beyond Dover.

he day Dally left for New York, Merle, pretending to himself
he’d lost his spectacles, had gone rooting around through everything he could
think of, opening boxes, looking under counterpanes and behind the framing of
the wagon, till he caught sight of a stuffed old doll, Clarabella, the one who’d
joined them, as Dally liked to put it, years back in Kansas City, just lying
now in the housedust, and he was surprised to find himself with emotions
somehow not his own, as if the forlornness were old Clarabella’s there, all
abandoned in the full light of day, with no more little girl to pick her up.
One look at that face, and the way the paint was worn out, and it sure made a
man’s damn valves start in to dribbling, if not unseat completely.

He waited till after the next bullion
day and then quit the amalgamator job at Little Hellkite, packed up developing
chemicals and photographic plates and a few pictures he was content to hold on
to after giving the rest away. A few of those he kept might have been of Dally.
He found a couple of good horses and proceeded down the San Miguel and up over
Dallas Divide and up through Gunnison and down the great long eastern slope to
Pueblo, something at the back of his mind convinced that years ago on the way
west to Colorado he had missed something essential, some town he hadn’t seen,
some particular piece of hardware that unless he found it again and put it to
use, might even cross off a good part of the meaning of his life so far, is how
important it was. Heading east, he was aware that Dally was someplace a thousand
miles in front of him, but it wasn’t as if he was planning on going all the way
back east. Only as far as he had to.

One Saturday evening Merle rolled
into Audacity, Iowa. It was just after suppertime, some light still in the sky,
a few farm wagons heading back out of

town into a haze that made the little oak trees look round
and flat as lollipops, and he noticed a small crowd shifting and muttering and
about to turn boisterous out in front of a flatroofed clapboard building with
multicolored gas lamps, already on before the streetlighting, spelling out
against the fading day the name of the local movingpicture house,
dreamtime movy
. Merle parked the wagon
and wandered over to join the crowd.

“Looks like some excitement.” He
noticed that, like a lot of these country theaters, this one had been converted
from a church of some persuasion too small at last to support a minister. Made
sense to Merle, who didn’t see much difference between movie audiences and
crowds at tentmeetings—it was the same readiness to be carried into some
storyteller’s spell.

“Third week in a row,” he was
promptly informed, “the blamed thing won’t work, and we’re waiting for Fisk to
come out and give us the usual hooey.”

“Worst possible place it could’ve
happened, she’s hangin on to this log in the river—”